Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Projects
    • Corporate Taxation in a Globalised Era
    • US Election 2020
    • The Transformation of Work
    • The Coronavirus Crisis and the Welfare State
    • Just Transition
    • Artificial intelligence, work and society
    • What is inequality?
    • Europe 2025
    • The Crisis Of Globalisation
  • Audiovisual
    • Audio Podcast
    • Video Podcasts
    • Social Europe Talk Videos
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Shop
  • Membership
  • Ads
  • Newsletter

Fixing care: refocusing on those who need it and those who deliver it

by Oliver Roethig and Adrian Durtschi on 29th October 2020 @ORoethig

Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on LinkedIn

It is time to put the patient-to-carer relationship at the centre of this most human-faced sector—and the EU must play its part.

care workers, nursing homes
Oliver Roethig

The collective effort to protect those most at risk from the coronavirus is unprecedented. Through changes to their everyday lives, an overwhelming majority of people are showing a commitment to putting human lives ahead of their usual comforts. 

Similarly, nursing-home workers have kept on going, through truly traumatic situations. For too many of them this effort has cost them their life. After ten of the residents she had been caring for passed away, Marie-Madeleine was among the first of these workers to succumb in Brussels—the very city where European Union decision-makers can now take decisive action. 

care workers, nursing homes
Adrian Durtschi

Today, workers across Europe are mobilising for the Global Day of Action for Care. We join them in remembering the fallen and fighting for those still on the front line.

Caring for the most vulnerable is a value that unites people across Europe. Yet, mirroring the experiences of others on the front lines, the crisis has stretched our increasingly precarious nursing homes to breaking point.

Staggeringly under-prepared

Nursing homes were staggeringly under-prepared for this crisis. Across the European Union member states, their residents have accounted for 30-60 per cent of Covid-19 deaths.

Join our growing community newsletter!

"Social Europe publishes thought-provoking articles on the big political and economic issues of our time analysed from a European viewpoint. Indispensable reading!"

Polly Toynbee

Columnist for The Guardian

Thank you very much for your interest! Now please check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Powered by ConvertKit

While viruses stem from nature, the factors facilitating their spread within nursing homes are products of human choices. The results of the drive towards unsafe staffing levels, chronic equipment shortages and cuts in personnel training are nothing short of a disaster. Quality of care has long been sacrificed at the altar of quantity. Corners have been consistently cut to prioritise the saving of money over the saving of lives.

These choices are symptomatic of a deeper crisis—the crisis in workplace democracy. When working people have a say over decisions in their company, they use it to ensure safety and improve their conditions. After years of undercutting each other, including for public contracts, nursing homes are among the workplaces with the worst working conditions and least receptiveness to collective bargaining.

Procurement lever

Sectoral collective bargaining gives workers the ability to drive up conditions across the whole industry and must be part of the solution. There are signs the EU is waking up to the underlying structures that suppress workers’ conditions. Just yesterday, the European Commission released the draft of the Minimum Wage and Collective Bargaining Directive. If the EU is serious about addressing the situation, decision-makers must start by requiring that public procurement—a major lever when it comes to the care sector—limits eligibility only to those companies that respect workers’ collective-bargaining rights.

Investing in care means improving staffing levels, so patients can receive the dignified care they need. Long-term care facilities with higher staffing ratios have better resident outcomes and workers are more likely to feel confident about the care they are providing. When care is rushed, residents feel dehumanised and workers report forgetting or having to omit tasks due to lack of time. Understaffing leads to high anxiety and burnout, mostly because workers fear injury to themselves and residents. 


We need your help! Please join our mission to improve public policy debates.


As you may know, Social Europe is an independent publisher. We aren't backed by a large publishing house or big advertising partners. For the longevity of Social Europe we depend on our loyal readers - we depend on you. You can support us by becoming a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month.

Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Workers in the care sector are some of the lowest paid: many direct caregivers work at minimum wage or well below the living wage. The pandemic has revealed that our nursing homes had not provided the necessary training associated with infectious disease management. Staff often lacked the training to use personal protective equipment properly—even when this was available. 

Heavy resort to agency and temporary staff in long-term care has presented a particular challenge in terms of training. For better disease management, we need better jobs. Driving down conditions, to the extent that people need to find multiple jobs at multiple facilities to make ends meet, can no longer be an option. Decent conditions are essential for those who do this essential work.

Wealth extraction

Paralysis gripped nursing homes during the pandemic. Under-staffed, under-trained and under-equipped, they lacked any slack to adapt to the exceptional circumstances. The problem is not a lack of money. The money is there but it is being redistributed upwards—as share buy-backs, debt-servicing, dividend payments and other forms of wealth extraction.

Private-equity investors, in particular, are snapping up what they see as ‘attractive opportunities’. Typical approaches involve loading nursing homes with debt and sale-and-leaseback of the properties (as exemplified by the recently signed deal by Orpea). While the real-economy nursing-home business is burdened with these new payment requirements, the investors are allowed to extract the money and invest it elsewhere. In the worst-case scenario the nursing home will go bankrupt but these predators know that governments will be forced to step in beforehand, as they cannot let elderly people become homeless.

It is crucial that the EU targets its interventions and policies at improving care, rather than safeguarding these destructive practices of wealth extraction. These structural problems, in one of the world’s most developed regions, are manifest policy failures. As well as resulting in better resident outcomes, higher staffing ratios would lead to the creation of jobs rooted in the communities care homes serve. 

In addition, because this industry is primarily female, investing in care could reduce the gender wage gap by as much as 5 per cent. Investing in pay also reduces the need for workers to work more than 40 hours per week, leading to less burnout. Investing in decent jobs, staffing, training and equipment would align pursuit of economic recovery with improved long-term care. 

Protecting the vulnerable

Care cannot be fully explained by numbers: its physical and emotional aspects demand that we regulate in a way that protects the most vulnerable in our communities. In the EU, the creation of  a health union is being discussed. It would include stress tests on health systems and common minimum standards. These are all positive improvements—but until policies and funds can be explicitly connected to worker conditions and resident environments, there are no guarantees for those living and working in the system. 

Better working conditions are achieved through sectoral collective bargaining. By working together, unions, employers and governments can support each other to ensure decent work, as well as raising the standards of care. Workers in the sector need to be able to form and join unions. Through sectoral bargaining we can raise the bar for everyone at the same time. 

Beyond an issue for trade unions alone, improving conditions for care is increasingly recognised as an objective towards which all caring organisations, including the charitable and faith-based, are working. One easy way to do that is to redirect public procurement from incentivising companies to cut corners to driving up care quality instead.

The coronavirus recognises no borders and care needs are not fundamentally different from one country to the next. Investment combined with sectoral bargaining can ensure that care workers in all European countries, in private or public facilities, have decent working and living conditions. We have the opportunity to create a better future—a care system which protects everyone and builds a shield against the coronavirus for all.

Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on LinkedIn
Home ・ Fixing care: refocusing on those who need it and those who deliver it

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: coronavirus and welfare state

About Oliver Roethig and Adrian Durtschi

Oliver Roethig heads UNI Europa, the European service workers’ union. He was elected as regional secretary of the seven-million-strong union for a second consecutive term in 2016. Adrian Durtschi is head of UNICARE, which represents more than one million workers worldwide in the care sector.

Partner Ads

Most Popular Posts

Thomas Piketty,capital Capital and ideology: interview with Thomas Piketty Thomas Piketty
sovereignty Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty Peter Verovšek
China,cold war The first global event in the history of humankind Branko Milanovic
centre-left, Democratic Party The Biden victory and the future of the centre-left EJ Dionne Jr
Covid 19 vaccine Designing vaccines for people, not profits Mariana Mazzucato, Henry Lishi Li and Els Torreele

Most Recent Posts

European Pillar of Social Rights,social pillar EU credibility as a people’s union rests on the social pillar Liina Carr
vaccine nationalism,Big Pharma Vaccine nationalism won’t defeat the pandemic Sharan Burrow
Can we change the climate on climate change? Karin Pettersson
adaptation strategy Managing the unavoidable impact of climate change Ludovic Voet
platform,crowdworker Germany adds to recognition of platform workers Roman Kormann

Other Social Europe Publications

US election 2020
Corporate taxation in a globalised era
The transformation of work
The coronavirus crisis and the welfare state
Whither Social Rights in (Post-)Brexit Europe?

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

FEPS Progressive Yearbook

Twenty-twenty has been an extraordinary year. The Covid-19 pandemic and the multidimensional crisis that it triggered have boosted existing trends and put forward new challenges. But they have also created unexpected opportunities to set a new course of action for the European Union and—hopefully—make a remarkable leap forward in European integration.

The second edition of the Progressive Yearbook, the yearly publication of the Foundation for European Progressive studies, revolves around the exceptional events of 2020 and looks at the social, economic and political impact they will have in 2021. It is a unique publication, which aims to be an instrument for the progressive family to reflect on the recent past and look ahead to our next future.


CLICK HERE

Social Europe Publishing book

With a pandemic raging, for those countries most affected by Brexit the end of the transition could not come at a worse time. Yet, might the UK's withdrawal be a blessing in disguise? With its biggest veto player gone, might the European Pillar of Social Rights take centre stage? This book brings together leading experts in European politics and policy to examine social citizenship rights across the European continent in the wake of Brexit. Will member states see an enhanced social Europe or a race to the bottom?

'This book correctly emphasises the need to place the future of social rights in Europe front and centre in the post-Brexit debate, to move on from the economistic bias that has obscured our vision of a progressive social Europe.' Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland


MORE INFO

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

Renewing labour relations in the German meat industry: an end to 'organised irresponsibility'?

Over the course of 2020, repeated outbreaks of Covid-19 in a number of large German meat-processing plants led to renewed public concern about the longstanding labour abuses in this industry. New legislation providing for enhanced inspection on health and safety, together with a ban on contract work and limitations on the use of temporary agency employees, holds out the prospect of a profound change in employment practices and labour relations in the meat industry. Changes in the law are not sufficient, on their own, to ensure decent working conditions, however. There is also a need to re-establish the previously high level of collective-bargaining coverage in the industry, underpinned by an industry-wide collective agreement extended by law to cover the entire sector.


FREE DOWNLOAD

ETUI advertisement

ETUI/ETUC (online) conference Towards a new socio-ecological contract 3-5 February 2021

The need to effectively tackle global warming puts under pressure the existing industrial relations models in Europe. A viable world of labour requires a new sustainability paradigm: economic, social and environmental.

The required paradigm shift implies large-scale economic and societal change and serious deliberation. All workers need to be actively involved and nobody should be left behind. Massive societal coalitions will have to be built for a shared vision to emerge and for a just transition, with fairly distributed costs, to be supported. But this is also an opportunity to redefine our societal goals and how they relate to the current focus on (green) growth.


REPLAY ALL SESSIONS

To access the videos, click on the chosen day then click on the ‘video’ button of your chosen session (plenary or panel). It will bring you immediately to the corresponding video. To access the available presentations, click on the chosen day then click on the ‘information’ button. Check the links to the available presentations.

Eurofound advertisement

Industrial relations: developments 2015-2019

Eurofound has monitored and analysed developments in industrial relations systems at EU level and in EU member states for over 40 years. This new flagship report provides an overview of developments in industrial relations and social dialogue in the years immediately prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Findings are placed in the context of the key developments in EU policy affecting employment, working conditions and social policy, and linked to the work done by social partners—as well as public authorities—at European and national levels.


CLICK FOR MORE INFO

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Find Social Europe Content

Search Social Europe

Project Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

.EU Web Awards